14 comments:

Not impressed with that Nyhan piece... I don't seen any connect at all between the Hilary Rosen flap and the Nikki Haley Twitter story. One was a predictable overreaction to something someone actually said, while the other was a lie that got unfortunately spread around.

I have to say, I can't blame anyone for pouncing on something like the Rosen quote and trying to make a big deal out of it. Who would have guessed in the summer of 2000 that an unobjectionable quote from Al Gore about his role in the development of the Internet would turn out to swing the election.

"I can't blame anyone for pouncing on something like the Rosen quote and trying to make a big deal out of it." Um, why not? Rosen is not in fact a politician or someone currently closely associated with a politician. No one should care at all what she says in the context of the presidential election.

Nyhan's whinging about Twitter is better applied to MSM coverage of Martin/Zimmerman. Most non-conservatives have a fanciful view of the facts because they were fooled initially and are biased against correcting themselves. Lots of Twitter foolishness is easily corrected because of bottom-up dynamics, but there's no way that the MSM is going to correct itself as loudly or repetitively as it first erred.

My fanciful view of the facts is that Zimmerman, who has a well-known history of violence, stalked Martin - who was doing nothing wrong and had every right to be where he was - after being explicitly told by the police to stand down, accosted Martin for no rational or justifiable reason, and murdered him in cold blood.

Yes. Except for the "history of violence" claim (which I'd call exaggeration) everything you wrote is a little wrong or supposition. And you didn't even include the usual liberal confusion about relative sizes, "lack" of injuries, or the much-changed claims about what Zimmerman said over the phone.

I always thought people were mainly upset just because there was a shooting death with relatively inconclusive facts but then no thorough investigation was taken or charges (either moderately serious or quite serious) pressed. Most reasonable people aren't determined to pre-judge this; they just want a sensible investigation.

After the police took his pistol and handcuffed him, they took Zimmerman to the copshop and questioned him for two hours, then had him go over his story the next day. Besides the eyewitness who backed up his side and the injuries that ABC tried to convince everyone he didn't have...

... he's been open to the point that he initially eschewed a lawyer. You'll notice from the link from my above comment that the state has no case for Murder 2 and not much for manslaughter unless it has bang-up evidence that is unrevealed. That's why he wasn't charged.

Most blacks I've read were initially enraged that Zimmerman (mestizo) was a white man who got away with racist murder. This only looks to be the case because the MSM called him white over and over, described him as 250#, showed grainy footage and misrepresented it, brought in bogus voice experts who made stupid claims, etc.

Describe the "assault" of the officer and the "DV." What were the claims on both sides and the outcomes? I could truly say that Martin was suspended from school several times for property damage, trespassing, and on suspicion of robbery and drug dealing, but that sounds worse than it probably was.

Congressional Democrats in the '60s included people like John Stennis, Richard Russell, Harry Byrd, James Eastland, Russell Long, William Natcher, Jamie Whitten... All of those men were to the right of the most conservative Democrat in Congress today.

JzB,It's not at all clear in that link, but this isn't Poole making stuff up. It's what the data say. To do that, he uses leverage from members of congress who serve together. So, you have a guy from the 1950s who overlaps with a guy from the 1960s. You can compare their voting in the years they shared to put them on the same playing field. Poole's method does that for the entire Congress. The plot in that article is for the first dimension of NOMINATE, his statistical procedure's name. It's, essentially, the economic dimension that comes out of seeing how votes align.

Folks smarter than I have gone up against the methodology and failed.

That said, I take your point. A vote in 1950 on whether gays should be considered human beings would have likely gotten very few votes; that kind of social change doesn't get reflected in here very well, I don't think. However, every time I think about how that would work in the economic dimension, I keep thinking that his technique really should capture that movement.

A possible catch of the day (albeit quite mediacentric): NY magazine's John Heilemann clearly doesn't read (or doesn't agree with) his colleague Jon Chait. Even after Chait blogged about the uselessness of advocacy polls ( http://nymag.com/daily/intel/2012/04/advocacy-polls-are-not-real-polls.html ), Heilemann goes ahead and makes central use of them in his latest column for the magazine:

"But the politics of Obama’s tax platform and his wider argument in favor of economic fairness aren’t clearly in his favor. According to a recent poll released by centrist Democratic group Third Way, 42 percent of independents and 43 percent identified as “swing independents” (those who remain undecided) agree with the statement, “We need an economy based on fairness, where the rich pay their fair share, corporations play by the rules, and all Americans get a fair shot.” By contrast, 47 and 51 percent of those groups agree with the assertion, “We need an economy based on opportunity, where hard work is rewarded, the government lives within its means, and economic growth is our top priority.” And by wide majorities, both groups say that fixing the budget deficit is more important than reducing income inequality. All of which reaffirms the one soft spot for Obama in other national polls: For all Romney’s troubles, he is running roughly even with the incumbent on the issues of jobs, the economy, and putting the nation’s fiscal house in order."http://nymag.com/news/politics/powergrid/obama-romney-war-2012-4/